More and more people get news on Facebook and Twitter, but the news they want is different

Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly important sources
of news for Americans.

A new Pew
Research Center study finds that nearly 2 out of every 3
users on Facebook and Twitter get news on the online services.
That's a big increase from just two years ago, when only 47
percent of Facebook users used the social network for news, the
report said.

Both companies have ramped up their efforts in recent years
to position themselves as the go-to source for the latest news
about everything from current events to celebrity gossip.

According to the Pew report though, consumers use the rival
social networks to satisfy different aspects of their
daily news diet.

For breaking news, Twitter still dominates. The
proportion of users who claim that they get the latest
news from Twitter -- 59 percent -- is nearly
twice as high as the 31 percent of Facebook users who follow
breaking news on the social network. On Twitter, users are also more likely than
Facebookers to see news on these four widely-read topics:
national government and politics, international
affairs, sports and
business.

But Facebook users are more likely to actively
engage when it comes to news about government and politics.
About 28% of Facebook users comment on articles about those
topics that are posted on the social network, compared to
just 13 percent of Twitter users, the study finds.

Both platforms are racing to make news a bigger part of the user
experience: Twitter will be soon rolling out a
feature called "Project
Lightning", which will display a collection of
photos and videos instead of the traditional timeline. Both users
and non-users can enjoy the immersive experience which will mesh
multimedia -- Vines, Periscopes, etc. -- into an
aggregated feed.

Kevin Weil, product head for Twitter,
told Buzzfeed that "this is a brand-new way to look at
tweets. This is a bold change, not evolutionary."

Facebook, on the other hand, recently dispatched a product called
"Instant
Articles". It allows media companies to post stories directly
to the app, taking a tenth of the time to load
stories on mobile phones than if readers clicked on a publisher's
link as per the traditional post.